Supercomputer Helps Identify Subsurface Energy Reserves

Press Release

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

SGI's supercomputer, the largest Commercial HPC System on the planet, chosen by Total to streamline & enhance research efforts.

Total has selected the SGI ICE X High Performance Computing (HPC) system as the platform for its new supercomputer named "Pangea." Pangea provides the necessary data processing power for the identification of oil and gas reserves below the Earth's surface. The massive amount of data the system generates is managed by the SGI InfiniteStorage ecosystem and the SGI DMF tiered storage virtualization solution.

Pangea is the largest commercial HPC system in the world, giving Total's in-house engineers and geologists an extremely powerful tool to enable the application of analytical and numerical models that support the development of three dimensional visualizations of underground geological formations, key to identifying potential deposits of oil and gas and to determining optimal extraction methods.

Total's investment in Pangea will enable research scientists to develop more complete visualizations of seismic landscapes over time, while concurrently running simulations at 10 times the resolution of existing oil and gas reservoir models. Ultimately this new research should provide a clearer picture of what is happening beneath Earth's surface, allowing for more efficient upstream oil and gas exploration, as well as the discovery of reserves under more challenging geological conditions.

"Total is committed to leveraging technological innovation and high performance computing to provide the best response to growing global energy demand," said Philippe Malzac, CIO Exploration and Production for Total. "The efficiency of the SGI ICE X system, which represents high computational power using a minimal amount of energy, gives Total the smallest footprint and lowest TCO possible. This was a key factor in our selection of SGI ICE X for the Pangea system."